Camping - Para Wirra Campgrounds (27 Sep - 30 Sep)

 The first week of school holidays we had planned to be in Sweden but had to cancel for Covid. Then we planned a trip up to Darwin and down the west coast, but the borders weren't open yet, so we opted for a trip to the Flinders Ranges.

Then, because the start of the rugby season had been delayed by Covid, it turned out that the week heralded the start of rugby finals, of which both the boys and I were playing.  So we changed plans again - we needed to be close enough that we could get back for trainings if we had to.  

So Kris suggested Para Wirra. Located near the Barossa Valley and Mount Crawford Forest, we hadn't been there before and the area looked like it had some nice walking paths, so we booked in.

The plan was to play our rugby games on Saturday then come home and load up.  We'd then head out earlyish on Sunday morning.  A few days before we were due to go, we found out that Tom had a regional rugby training on Sunday morning at 9am.

On the Saturday we packed everything, including the bikes.  We then drove down to Tomas' training and Kris dropped Tomas and I off.  There wasn't much room for parking a full car and camper trailer around the ground (Tregenza Oval), so Kris took the car to the nearby shopping centre and pumped up the bike tyres.  They waited there until Tomas was finished and then ducked back to pick us up. From there it was about an hour drive out to Para Wirra.

 

We'd recently bought a new annex for the camper, so we tried setting that up first.  Unfortunately the mounting was too high (we're going to need an adapter plate) so it left some gaps. But it was huge and we had plenty of room.  Before long the solar panels were set up and the camper was ready to go:

Our Campsite

Having set up, we went on a quick explore of the the campgrounds and the kids went for a bike ride around the area, discovering mud mountain and a brown snake.

The Campsite

We had to do a quick drive into town to pick up some bread, as I had cleverly left all of our bread loaves, hamburger buns and hotdog rolls at home. We also needed to pick up a new inner tube for Alana's bike.

That night we had hamburgers for dinner. Tomas helped cut up the onion and salads, still wearing his rugby pads from training.

Master Chef at work

The view around our campsite

We had a pretty good sleep the first night after going to bed early. We were all up and about by about 7:30 the next day. Kris had gotten up much earlier and was rewarded with a beautiful sunrise:

 

Kris and I sorted out the campsite while the kids took some bike rides.  We ended up swapping the annex back to the old one as we were worried (rightfully so) about incoming rain.

 Kris had to attend some online university lectures, so we set her up with the laptop and the kids and I went for a ride.  She finished around 11, so we ducked back into town to get a few other items we had forgotten (great start, but this time it was only sponges and dishwashing liquid).  Kris needed to be back for 2pm for her next lecture, so the kids and I went for a drive.  We drove to Chalk Campground where both Cam and Alana had attended school camps and they pointed out where they had ridden, hiked and kayaked.  We then went looking for firewood, but it was not permitted to collect it from any of the areas nearby so we ended up buying a few bags and heading back to camp.

Tom showing off our setup

The kids off for a ride

When Kris was done we decided to go for a walk/ride down to Wild Dog Track:

The lake at the end of the track

We got back to camp just before it got dark and got the fire going.  I started tacos for dinner:

Just before dinner was ready, we had some unexpected visitors - the Taylors.  They joined us around the fire and we had a good night chatting.  They had to head off around 10:00 so we cleaned up and headed in for the night.

The weather so far had been pretty warm and sunny, around 20 degrees C with few clouds.  But on the 3rd day (Tuesday) we woke to some pretty dark storm clouds.  It hadn't started raining, so we had breakfast and decided to go out for a drive.

Our breakfast visitor - nicknamed Mr Floofy-Wings

 

Our first stop was the Barossa Reservoir dam, otherwise known as the Whispering Wall. It was started in 1899 and completed 1902 to replace a well system that had become unsafe.  It is an arch style dam, the first in South Australia and was the highest in the country (at 36m).  The shape of the dam causes sound to be transmitted along the wall, so any sound made at one end can be heard 140m at the other end.

The reservoir itself holds 4515 ML and captures water from the South Para River.

Whispering Wall

Panoramic view from the top looking back

Panoramic view from the top looking down

The kids "posing"

 We had to leave when another family arrived and Tomas whispered across the wall to them "I have children in my basement."  When I told him that was it and it was time to go, he said "Don't put me back in the cage."  The other kids were very supportive:

 

 

After we fled the Whispering Wall, our next stop was Gumeracha for the Big Rocking Horse.  The rocking horse was built in 1981 at the site of a wooden toy factory, replacing an original wooden giraffe. The area hosts the Big Rocking Horse, a wooden toy factory, cafe and an small zoo.

The Horse is 18.3m tall:

Signpost to Australian towns, there was also one for other countries - we were about 15,500km from Stockholm.

After checking out the horse and the toy factory we visited the animal park:

Entry to the park

The entry was guarded by a guard peacock

Alana feeding a wallaby

The stand-off.  Last time we came here, Cameron was about 5. He stood by the fence and the emu reach over and snapped its beak just about his head. He was determined to show it he wasn't intimidated this time

The kids also found a painted stone at the Rocking Horse.  These stones were placed around to be found and either kept or relocated:

Waiting for everyone to wash their hands after feeding the animals

Once we'd finished at the Big Rocking Horse, we headed to Melba's Chocolate factory.  Melba's started making chocolate in a small wash house in Adelaide in 1981, but when demand increased they purchased an old Farmers Union Factory in 1990.  The factory sells chocolates and sweets and normally hosts demonstrations and samples, but these have been halted due to Covid.

We all got some lollies/chockies to eat and the kids admired the Social Distancing Chocolate:

Social Distancing Chocolate

With the kids taste for finding things whetted by the painted rock, we decided to do some Geocaching on the way back to camp.  Geocaching is using a GPS to locate hidden packages.  Some of the packages had 'swaps' little toys or trinkets to keep and swap and all had a log book to fill in.  We found our first one just across the road stuck between two road signs:

Our first geocache

Log Book

Our second one was a bigger cache with a set of flexible dinosaurs. We ended up with Diego the Dashboard Dino for our car.

When we got back to camp the rain started to fall.  It continued to fall heavily for the rest of the evening and night.  We ended up sheltering in the camper and I cooked hotdogs for dinner.  We played some games and tried to keep warm and dry.  The annex leaked a little but the camper was nice and dry.

The next morning was wet, but the rain had held off for a bit.  We got the fire going and had some hot drinks and bacon and eggs for breakfast.  We then decided to go for a drive to the lake and then a hike to see if we could find some more geocaches:

 From the lake we decided to head into the bush to look for some more caches.  The first turned out to be a pretty solid bush bash, heading down and then up a quite steep hill and over a creek.  We ended up finding the treasure chest cache inside a cave:

The Cave

Treasure coming out

The view from the cache was pretty awesome

Hiking out

Our next cache

Heading back in to camp

We arrived back in camp and cooked up some sausages for lunch.  The rain started again pretty heavily, and didn't show any sign of letting up. We had planned to head off early the next day (Thursday) but it didn't seem worth spending another evening cramped up in the camper if we were just going to pack up and go the next day, so we made the decision to start packing.  By the time we had committed to packing it was pouring with rain and we got soaked.  It ended up taking quite a while to get everything sorted and it was getting dark when we finally got going.  We were home by about 8:30pm and then had to open everything to air and dry it out.

Overall it was a great trip, spoiled only slightly by the rain at the end.  It also sparked an interest in geocaching, so we have already started looking at some planned walks to find more caches.